LaVerne Cooper weeds the small flower garden Wednesday afternoon that she planted outside of her Foote Homes apartment. Memphis Housing Authority proposes razing Foote Homes, and rebuilding a mixed-income and mixed-use development. The Vance Avenue Collaborative, a grassroots organization, had hoped the current units could be restored. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

Cameron Gentry, 16, messes around on his bike after school Wednesday afternoon near his apartment at Foote Homes. Memphis Housing Authority proposes razing Foote Homes, and rebuilding a mixed-income and mixed-use development. The Vance Avenue Collaborative, a grassroots organization, had hoped the current units could be restored. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

Memphis Housing Authority will apply this month for a multimillion-dollar grant to raze and rebuild Foote Homes, but a local community organization continues to clash with MHA over the plan that would affect more than 400 families in the housing project and more than 4,000 residents in the Vance Avenue neighborhood.

Sept. 10 is the deadline to apply for a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which, with the required matches from public and private funds, is worth more than $100 million. The federally funded, competitive Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant could be used to revitalize Foote Homes at South Danny Thomas and Mississippi boulevards and the area surrounding it.

Memphis Housing Authority intends to submit a proposal to HUD to demolish Foote Homes, and replace it with a mixed-income and mixed-use development.

"It eliminates multigenerational poverty ... and gives people something new and vibrant," said Robert Lipscomb, executive director of MHA and director of the city's Division of Housing and Community Development.

The last large-scale public-housing project composed solely of units for low-income residents of all ages, Foote Homes was built in the 1940s and covers 46 acres Downtown. It is bounded by South Fourth Street to the west, Vance Avenue to the north, South Lauderdale Street to the east and Mississippi Boulevard to the south.

A local grassroots organization, the Vance Avenue Collaborative, created its own plan for the area that calls for redevelopment, not demolition, of Foote Homes. Key aspects of its proposal, called the Vance Avenue Community Transformation Plan, include the restoration of a bayou, creation of a worker-owned-and-managed grocery store and a focus on community policing by the Memphis Police Department.

In its effort to deconcentrate poverty, MHA's plan would relocate more than 400 families. It is unclear how many residents would qualify to return to Foote Homes after its redevelopment.

Nicole Cleaborn, whose parents have lived in the Vance Avenue area for 40 years, said change in the area is desperately needed. But she said it is vital that most residents of Foote Homes should be allowed to return to the area after redevelopment.

A former Vance Avenue area resident, Cleaborn was raised close to the old Cleaborn Homes, a housing project named for her uncle, a Korean War hero. The project east of Foote Homes was demolished under the HOPE VI program and rebuilt as Cleaborn Point at Heritage Landing.

"Yes, stockholders and investors want to make money — and I get that — but they should be able to make money and the majority should be able to come back and live there," Cleaborn said. "That way everybody wins."

The Foote Homes plan is a part of the city's billion-dollar commercial and residential Heritage Trail Redevelopment project to improve a 20-block area south of Beale Street and east of South Main.

According to Noel Hutchinson, who has served for 18 years as pastor of First Baptist Church Lauderdale about a block from Foote Homes, the city's plan is not perfect, but it is what the majority of the members of the community and stakeholders want.

"From those that I have talked to, I basically get the impression that they are ready for new housing stock," said Hutchinson, whose wife works for Lipscomb in the city's Division of Housing and Community Development. "It is needed. It really is needed."

If MHA's plan for Foote Homes is approved, displaced residents could receive Section 8 vouchers that would help supplement their rent in a different location in Memphis. According to evaluations ordered by HUD, most of the 4,000 families that have been relocated from the city's housing projects in the past 15 years have used their rent subsidies to move away from Downtown, to neighborhoods such as Frayser, Raleigh, Whitehaven, Hickory Hill, North and South Memphis.

"It (tearing down Foote Homes) is important for a number of reasons," Lipscomb said. "I think — first and foremost — because it will eliminate public housing."

The five previous redevelopments — when large, public housing units were demolished and rebuilt — began in the mid-1990s under the purview of HOPE VI. Depending on the outcome of the Choices grant, Foote Homes could follow the path of Hurt Village, now Uptown; LeMoyne Gardens, now College Park; Lamar Terrace, now University Place; Dixie Homes, now Legends Park; and, most recently, Cleaborn Homes, now Cleaborn Pointe at Heritage Landing. Most had been built in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Obama administration began re-evaluating the HOPE VI program in 2009 and replaced it with the Choice Neighborhoods program. Unlike HOPE VI, the new program requires a one-for-one replacement of subsidized housing units, so for every unit that is demolished, a replacement unit must be built.

MHA will need to put up about $60 million to $90 million in private and public funds to match the grant. MHA and city officials are still trying to determine how such funding would be secured.

Not everyone agrees that the plan is a boon to Memphis or that city officials and MHA have adequately collaborated with community members.

"Not only are they not carrying out the will of the community, they are not serious about hearing the will of the people," said Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., pastor of The New Olivet Baptist Church, which owns property in the area and has been involved with residents for years.

MHA had a contract with the director of the Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis, Ken Reardon, and students from the university in 2011 to gather information from members of the Vance Avenue community and residents of Foote Homes. The academic group spent months gathering information from area residents and community organizations.

However, MHA terminated its contract with the group in August 2012. Lipscomb said MHA took the action because, "They were going in a totally different direction" than MHA was.

Reardon claims MHA had a predetermined plan for the area before contracting with his group, and that his group was fired after reporting that area residents did not want Foote Homes demolished.

Reardon has been working with the Vance Avenue Collaborative to generate an alternative to the "unfortunate plan put together by the city that does not — in our estimation — reflect the views the neighborhood projected."

Until last week, the group planned to submit its own application to HUD for the Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant. However, it pulled back after learning it would not meet key grant requirements, including site control and documentation of available local matching funds.

The group is hosting a Vance Avenue neighborhood meeting at 5 p.m. Thursday at the St. Patrick Community Outreach Center at 277 S. Fourth. Those who attend will discuss whether to resubmit an application to add Foote Homes to the National Register of Historic Places and whether to submit an unfair housing complaint to HUD.